SMHC

In “So Long, Lake Wobegon?,” a recent report from the Center for American Progress, Morgaen L. Donaldson examines the potential of teacher evaluation systems to raise teacher quality. The report specifically focuses on Cincinnati’s Teacher Evaluation System (TES) as a program that addresses many of the problems that afflict present teacher evaluation systems, and may therefore positively impact teacher and student learning. The SMHC staff at the Consortium for Policy Research in Education, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison helped Cincinnati design, formatively evaluate, and implement its TES, hailed by Donaldson as the best in the country. CPRE’s evaluation of the system focused on the implementation of five significant changes to TES after its initial year. Major changes were:

1. Revisions of the standards and rubrics to improve ease of use, improve consistency of language across rubric levels, and reduce sources of ambiguity.
2. Limiting the scope of coverage of the comprehensive evaluation to new teachers, teachers in their third year as a novice (Novice 3), teachers seeking continuing contracts or lead teacher credentials, teachers on intervention, and volunteers.
3. Reducing the number of classroom observations for the comprehensive evaluation from 6 to 5 to reduce evaluator workload. New hires and teachers on intervention will continue to have 6 observations.
4. Requiring evaluators to meet a standard of agreement with a set of master raters (‘certification’ of evaluators) to improve inter-evaluator consistency.
5. Increased emphasis on the annual observation process, including more intensive training for teachers, a focus on the same standards for all teachers each year, and professional development focused on these standards, to help prepare teachers for comprehensive evaluation starting in 2005-2006.

The CAP report also discusses the validity of these performance-based teacher evaluation systems, and the question of whether teachers with higher evaluation scores produce more student learning gains. SMHC researcher Anthony Milanowski, who helped evaluate TES, found that in Cincinnati performance ratings were correlated with value-added estimates of student learning in math and reading over the three years of the evaluation. Correlations averaged .35 for reading and .32 for math. This is a stronger relationship than has typically been found in research on evaluation systems in education, and is comparable to the typical relationship between evaluation scores and objective performance found in research on systems in the private sector.

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